


An Inevitable Orbit

by mumblefox



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 13:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11060070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblefox/pseuds/mumblefox
Summary: After capturing Ulaz and finding his hidden base, team Voltron takes some much-needed downtime. Shiro, on the other hand, has some much-needed conversations.





	An Inevitable Orbit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buttered_onions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttered_onions/gifts).



> okay check this out, in the canon of the show they're at Ulaz's weird hiding place for all of ten minutes before the robeast finds them and like....listen there's just no way it got there that fast, overruled, makes no sense, goodbye. anyway that leaves time for some neat conversations amirite
> 
> this fic is dedicated to/inspired by/a direct response to [Lisa Onions](http://butteredonions.tumblr.com) , who routinely murders me in general but with her super amazing star wars AU in particular, so I thought a little bit of murder of my own was in order.

 

* * *

 

 

The room they had provided for Ulaz, after his surrender, was comfortable. Brighter than he was used to, made of gleaming metal and pale colours, and small - not the quarters of a dignitary, but of a minor diplomat, perhaps. The bed he sat on was a little short, given his height, but it was soft, and he could get up and walk around, and he could operate the lights.

They had left the manacles on, though. It only made sense, given how easily he’d handled the smaller paladins, earlier. And there was a camera, which the green one had plunked pointedly on the small writing desk, to let him know that he was observed. That, too, made sense.

Things were going well, really. They hadn’t murdered him on sight, although a few of them had certainly tried. He had to admit that coming to blows with the Champion had scared him more than anything else in recent memory, but to see him - alive and well and being the leader the Blade had so desperately wanted him to be - had been a reward Ulaz had not come here expecting.

A gift, really. Progress. Hope. His time undercover with Haggar had meant something, because it had gotten the Champion - Shiro, he reminded himself - away from her.

Under the watchful eye of the camera, Ulaz sat quietly and waited. He didn’t know this ship’s capabilities, but it was old-fashioned tech; scanning his base for traps to their satisfaction might take quite some time. They would come fetch him, he supposed, when they were getting nearer.

However, rather sooner than he expected, the door pinged. Ulaz opened his eyes on the Champion, standing there in full paladin armour, and he experienced a moment of strange vertigo. Their positions had been reversed, once. He wondered if the...if _Shiro_ remembered.

The moment passed, however, when Shiro strode over to the table, picked up the camera, and chucked it out into the hallway. He left the door open as he dragged the room’s single chair over and dropped into it facing Ulaz. The open door was a challenge, and a test: go on, it said. Prove you’re untrustworthy by trying to escape. You won’t be able to get past the Champion, but go on: try.

It was not a test Ulaz was interested in engaging. He kept his eyes on Shiro, sitting stern and straight-spined, before him.

“I could be wrong,” Shiro said, “but I think you and I have a bit of catching up to do.”

Ulaz sat very still. “What is it you want to know?”

“How you got aboard the castle undetected,” he said. “How you escaped Haggar’s ship. How you knew about the blue lion being on Earth. Everything you know about my arm. And who the _quiznak_ you are.”

Ulaz had already been formulating his answer to the first question when Shiro asked the last, and it startled Ulaz out of his thoughts. “You don’t know me?” he said, unaccountably stung.

Shiro didn’t react to his surprise. “I lost most of my memories of my time with the Galra,” he said flatly. “I just recently remembered my escape. You were there, and that’s the only memory I have of you. The others only know that you ghosted in here and beat them all. We’re left wondering whose impression we should trust.”

This was troubling news. “I hope your paladins are uninjured,” Ulaz said. He spoke carefully, kept his tone neutral. Shiro had defended him before, from the Altean, but it was possible that, in the intervening vargas, he had changed his mind.

Especially if Shiro didn’t know him. If Shiro didn’t trust his memory.

“They’re fine, but they aren’t mine. We’re a team.”

“The hand does not lead the head,” Ulaz said. “You are the black paladin.”

Shiro didn’t reply. Ulaz watched him - the stillness that Shiro inhabited, the patience. Ulaz had seen this behaviour before.

Shiro, crouching in the arena, slowly circled by two leoptika, waiting them out; Shiro displaying one of his species’ uncanny abilities by simply stalking after a competitor, not allowing it to rest, until it collapsed out of sheer exhaustion; Shiro, standing in the back of his cell every time Ulaz passed by. On the brink of revolting, always. Tense with the promise of violence, the promise of a quick end to all of this, if he just picked his moment correctly.

All the best predators have this ability: to wait for the perfect moment. To not hesitate when it comes.

Ulaz had never really understood, before, how Shiro had always kept himself in check, how he had survived so long. Ulaz had not understood Shiro. Now, seeing him in the armour that had once belonged to Zarkon, Ulaz grasped a piece of it.

The castle ship hummed faintly in the silence. On Shiro’s word, they were pressing on towards Ulaz’s base. Towards the Blade. Towards victory, hopefully, at last and at last.

He couldn’t fathom it.

“Why did you trust me?” Ulaz said. “You, of all people, have little reason to think kindly of the galra.”

“You freed me,” Shiro said. “That means something to me.”

Ulaz shifted; the manacles dragged heavily at his wrists. Thace used to tease him about being fine-boned, before their calling within the Blade had separated them. Ulaz shoved the memory down. “Your paladins were quick to point out that it could have been a lie.”

“Was it?”

Again, that stillness - that composure. Ulaz measured his breath carefully, returned his steady gaze. “No. It was no lie.”

Shiro weighed his answer, his tone. Weighed Ulaz against caution, against fear. Ulaz bore it gracefully, used to such scrutiny. Every second of his life since being posted to Haggar’s staff had been a test of this kind, and for a small, wild moment, Ulaz almost resented that Shiro - so young, and so new to this war - thought he would be able to see a lie, when Haggar herself could not.

For a dizzying moment, Ulaz thought: maybe he could. He had been surprised by Shiro before. Fortunately, there was no lie to detect. Ulaz was here in good faith.

At last, Shiro’s mouth quirked in a way Ulaz didn’t understand, and he passed a hand over his face. “Okay,” he said, quietly, almost to himself. “Let’s say I believe you. Now answer the other questions.”

So Ulaz did, and eventually, the Altean man came to collect them. They had arrived.

 

* * *

 

Despite how distrustful the Princess was, Ulaz’s pocket dimension offered safety, reprieve, respite. A chance to rest. It was the first team Voltron had had, really, since their now-legendary battle with Zarkon, and they were all of them tired of fighting, for now.

Ulaz welcomed them. He flung open the doors of the deserted base, shared all the outpost had to offer. This was a turning point in the war. He felt it as surely as the drag-and-burn of atmospheric reentry: the first brush of touching something so much more vast than the individual self. This trust they had to build between Voltron and the Blade would start here, and he would not jeopardize it with caution.

So he was generous: with his time, with information, with anything they asked of him. They began to relax. To rest.

To talk back.

So it was that Ulaz learned of the corrupted wormhole, and everything that had happened after, from the green paladin. They had spent hours going over the math that powered the pocket, while Ulaz helpfully supplied her with schematics and data caches. He learned about the two Alteans - the only two that remained, a great sorrow - from the blue paladin, while Ulaz let him test out the base’s weaponry on the firing range. Learned about how they came to be paladins from the yellow one, during a discussion on galra biology and the chemical requirements of their diet. He had been cataloguing the base’s food supply, figuring out what their people could eat. In that discussion, Ulaz also learned that humans begin learning complex organic chemistry at a very young age, in which time they’re encouraged to eat their experiments.

Ulaz knew a fair bit about human biology and behaviour from studying Shiro as a captive. Nothing Shiro had ever done had unnerved Ulaz as much as that new information.

“It’s just baking,” laughed the yellow one, with the broad, open face. His smile was enormous, which Ulaz had learned the others were reassured by. Ulaz was not human, but he was a predator, too - when Hunk smiled, Ulaz saw his teeth. He knew what that meant.

Hunk didn’t trust Ulaz - didn’t offer any information that could be turned back on his friends - but this _baking_ was a subject he clearly loved, and Ulaz was happy to listen. The galra didn’t practice such experimentation; as obligate carnivores, there wasn’t a lot of call for it. Hunk promised to teach him, when they had more time.

Ulaz wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but he agreed anyway. Hunk smiled at him again. Ulaz tried not to take it personally.

From the red paladin, he learned nothing. After that first perfunctory questioning about the blade he carried, he hadn’t seen him at all. Ulaz respected that he wanted space, and didn’t go looking, just like he didn’t go looking for their distrustful princess, as desperate as he was to know more.

From Shiro, Ulaz didn’t learn anything about the other paladins. He only learned more about Shiro.

It began when Ulaz was taking his turn watching the sensor arrays for any sign of detection. He had been in the hidden base for many, many quintents, and it had never been found before. Still, Voltron being here might change things. All of them felt better when someone had an eye on the door.

The Blade taught a kind of loose meditation for shifts like this: not a lapse of focus, but a diffusion of it, so that time might pass more easily without distraction, and Ulaz was practicing this when his ears twitched, reacting to a noise in the hall.

He swam easily back into himself, settling his mind back behind his eyes, and turned as Shiro came into view.

Shiro paused at the door when he found Ulaz already looking at him, just a slight check in his expression.

This was, by now, familiar. Ulaz didn’t know what it meant, that flicker. It wasn’t doubt, but something like it. He didn’t know Shiro well enough to ask.

Shiro knocked his fist gently against the doorframe, smiling ruefully. “I forget,” he said, “how good galra ears can be.”

“And mine better than most,” Ulaz said. In the dim light of the sensor arrays, the scar on Shiro’s nose was barely visible. They had spoken at length, that first day on the castle, and Ulaz had had trouble looking away from it.

He’d been there when Shiro got it, after all. He remembered the snarled scab that had grown as it healed. Ulaz remembered all of it: the hair going white, the hand, every scar that Shiro kept carefully hidden under long sleeves, under armour. But the wound on his face had been...difficult, in a way the others weren’t. Ulaz still couldn’t account for why.

Luckily, staring at the scar was close enough to eye contact that Shiro couldn’t have noticed his difficulty. It wasn’t a subject Ulaz was eager to broach with him.

The flicker passed. Shiro cleared his throat. “I know I shouldn’t interrupt you, but I wanted to talk.”

Ulaz’s ears twitched minutely, a tell he had once buried, and which he was slowly allowing himself to reclaim. “You are always welcome,” he said, gesturing to the other chair in the room.

Again, that flicker in Shiro’s expression, a microsecond of some emotion Ulaz couldn’t name. Then it passed, and Shiro was collected again, sinking confidently into the chair. He leaned back, arms crossed over his chest. The metal on one side gleamed faintly. “I just want to know,” he said, “what we’re getting ourselves into, if we meet the Blades.”

This was a more definitive nod towards an alliance than Ulaz had gotten before. “We are a network,” Ulaz said, not entirely sure where to begin. Secret resistances don’t lend themselves to being talked about. “Our operatives are all over the empire, our resources collected and safeguarded over hundreds of years. I’m sure the Blade has ideas for acting against the empire, plans which they have lacked the resources to carry out. Maybe Voltron will provide the kind of firepower we lacked. I cannot say for certain.”

Shiro nodded, gaze turned down. It wasn’t the answer he had wanted, apparently. Ulaz tried again. “You are Voltron. If you have ideas, I’m sure our command will listen. Your opinions will be respected, and your safety considered at all times, if that is your concern.”

Shiro shook his head minutely, and a muscle in his jaw clenched. All at once, Ulaz realized that Shiro hadn’t asked the question he had really come here for. This wasn’t about the team. It wasn’t even really about the Blade, or Ulaz, or the alliance.

This was about Shiro.

“Never mind,” Shiro said to himself after an extended silence, and gathered himself to rise.

“Most of us are galra,” Ulaz said, gambling, and Shiro froze. That was it after all, then. Ulaz hadn’t wanted to be right about this.

Shiro didn’t say anything. He kept his arms crossed; the fingers of his metal arm dug into the bicep of his human one.

“They will expect to meet you, as the black paladin,” Ulaz continued carefully. “And they will expect to meet you face to face. It is their way.”

“Yeah,” Shiro said. Then, stronger: “Yeah, I know. I can manage. I just thought - ”

Ulaz didn’t know what precipice Shiro was so hesitant to approach, couldn’t urge him either back or toward it. It was a step Shiro had to take on his own. Ulaz had seen this determination before, in him, had seen this attitude of ‘I can do it, and I will, because I have to’. He’d always respected it. He respected it now.

And Shiro took a deep breath. Got there on his own. Stared directly at the long fall within him. “You’re galra,” Shiro said, closing his eyes for a moment as he said it. “But you saved me. I just have to get my head around...I have to convince myself, and I’m trying, but it’s - ”

“I know,” said Ulaz, as kindly as he could. “How can I help?”

That flicker again, like doubt, but not. Perhaps Shiro hadn’t expected that offer. “I don’t know,” he said, then rallied. “Will you just - do you have a family?”

Ulaz prickled: an old instinct. Not a safe topic within the Blades, not a safe topic around Haggar. With an effort, he resisted. Pushed away the easy lie. “Yes,” he said instead. For a moment, the thought of his family, so long denied, overtook him; Ulaz smiled to himself, dizzy with remembering, with finally speaking them back into existence. “Yes, I have a family. Would you like to hear about them?”

At last, Shiro’s arms uncrossed. He leaned back in his chair, looked at the distorted space outside the windows. “I would like that a lot,” Shiro said quietly.

“Will you tell me about yours?” Ulaz said carefully, and Shiro smiled to himself just as Ulaz had done. On him, here in the dark and the quiet, the expression was...affecting.

“Yeah,” said Shiro. “I think I’d like that.”

So they talked, until long after Ulaz’s shift and well into Shiro’s, until Lance came to take his turn with headphones around his neck and snacks stuffed in his pockets. They surrendered the room to him and went their separate ways, and for the rest of the day, Ulaz couldn’t think of anything but the low cadence of Shiro’s voice.

 

* * *

 

The conversation that Shiro began that day in the scanner array continued the next, while his paladins were engaged with repairing their Lions. Ulaz sat alone, trying to interpret a text that the green paladin had procured for him about human scientific disciplines, when Shiro sat down across from him.

It was a departure from the caution with which Shiro had approached him before. Ulaz had not been hiding, but it still felt like being sought out. Sought after. It was a kind of attention he had despised, under Haggar. Here, now, he very much did not.

Without looking up, Ulaz spun the text towards Shiro. “This information cannot be correct,” he said. “It concerns ancient human medical practices.”

Shiro scrolled to see the entirety of the diagram. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was called trepanation. It took us a long time to figure out medicine, and even now it’s not perfect. Lots of trial and error.”

“That practice is the one I really mean,” Ulaz said, taking his text back. “This drilling of holes is ghastly, but not as much as this tendency your species has: to simply try something in case it works, even if it is painful, or difficult, or deadly.”

Shiro shrugged. “You have to start somewhere.”

“I cannot understand it.”

“I’m not sure you have to.” Shiro was no longer looking at the text. His dark eyes rested on Ulaz, and Ulaz politely stored his text for later study. “What did the galra do, in their early days? How did you figure it all out?”

“Rigorously examined theory,” Ulaz said carefully, unable to decide if this was a subject of contention for humans. “I don’t wish to be rude. This recklessness of your species has clearly worked well for you, overall. It is only that our way is different.” Also less terrifying, intimidating, and painful - less barbaric - but those sentiments would certainly cross a line, and were emotional reactions besides; they didn’t represent his actual opinion, which he had to admit was confused admiration.

“Well, I’m actually here to do something a little reckless, if you’ll help me.”

“Of course,” said Ulaz at once, and Shiro - as was his tendency - hesitated for just that flicker of a moment in between one impulse and the next.

And then he took a deep breath and held his hand out towards Ulaz.

For a moment, Ulaz didn’t quite understand what he was supposed to do with it. When he reached back in confusion, Shiro’s breath caught and he snatched his hand back.

Ulaz froze. Shiro scrunched his face up, an expression Ulaz didn’t know how to interpret, but which was charming nonetheless. It was - spontaneous. Unguarded.

“Sorry,” Shiro said. “Galra hands have never been...gentle, for me.”

“An unfortunate truth, and one I am happy to help discredit,” said Ulaz. He had adopted a new tone of voice in these conversations with Shiro: softer, slower. Settling himself with hunched shoulders, with bent neck, gentling himself in every way he knew. He let his hand stay where it was, palm up on the table between them, fingers curled, relaxed. “If you are not ready, I won’t take offense.”

Shiro shook his head, but didn’t say anything more. He just set his jaw, reached out, set the tip of his first finger against Ulaz’s, and pushed it flat to the table. Held there. Both of them ignored the tremor in his hand. He repeated the procedure, after a moment, with his second finger, and then the third. His shortest finger was too short to reach Ulaz’s, so he stopped there, with his fingers pinning Ulaz’s counterparts to the table.

Ulaz made no move to pull away. Shiro’s fingers were warm, and his breathing was a little erratic, but he was holding steady. Ulaz’s instinct was to keep quiet, even though this progress was deserving of praise. He understood that he was only a tool by which Shiro could begin to overcome his anxiety, and he was happy to serve in such a manner.

After a moment, Shiro shifted his hand so that their palms were pressed together. Ulaz was careful to keep his fingers open instead of closing them over the back of Shiro’s hand, even though Shiro’s were clasped around his thumb. He set instinct aside: he had to say something. “I know this is only a first step,” Ulaz said, “but I am proud of you for taking it.”

“Well, we’re about to take step two,” said Shiro, withdrawing his hand and pushing back his sleeves. He settled his human hand on the table, exactly like Ulaz’s had been. “Your turn.”

Ulaz looked at Shiro, who wasn’t making eye contact. He was staring hard at his own hand as though willing it to stay where he put it. His face had gone slightly red, which Ulaz recognized as a sign of stress. “You’re sure?”

Shiro nodded, tight-lipped. Ulaz looked down, admired the delicacy of Shiro’s skin, how clearly it showed the fine tracery of veins running beneath it, the tendons in his wrist. How alien and strange he was, how fragile and yet unconquerable. “You have nothing to fear from me,” Ulaz said gently, and he returned the same touch Shiro had offered him, pressing the pads of their first fingers together.

Shiro didn’t flinch, but he didn’t relax right away, either. There was something in his face - some shadow that passed over and then lingered, dragging him somewhere deep inside himself. The expression was chilling. Ulaz hated that he had been part of bringing it on.

“Would you like me to withdraw?” he asked.

“No,” Shiro said at once, but then his finger twitched under Ulaz’s, as though he’d tried to pull it back.

Ulaz honoured Shiro’s directive and didn’t move. Their discussion from a moment ago rang in his mind, clear and urgent as a klaxon: reckless. He didn’t know which of them was more guilty of that in this moment, as Shiro flung himself headlong at his fear and Ulaz let him.

As Ulaz sat there with him, skin to skin, and pretended it was only for Shiro’s benefit.

This was not allowed. It was foolish, shortsighted. Reckless. Reckless. The word boiled on the back of his tongue.

Shiro breathed, deliberately. Reset his posture, a mechanical return to control. “No, I’m okay. It’s just...strange, for me.” The rest of his fingers uncurled deliberately, laid themselves flat on the table, and Ulaz matched them, slowly, one at a time. He could see Shiro’s pulse beating in his wrist, and could see it speed up, too.

“You are still nervous.”

Shiro offered him a wobbly grin. “Trying not to be.”

Ulaz smiled back. “Small progress is still progress,” he said. “But the Blade will understand your discomfort, you know. They will not push you.”

“It’s not for their sake,” Shiro said, and curled his fingers so that Ulaz’s curved over his, knuckles tucked against Shiro’s palm. Shiro stared hard at their joined hands, and Ulaz stared at Shiro. “It’s for me. And my team. Don’t - don’t tell them about this, okay? I don’t want them to know I’m like this.”

Ulaz nodded in agreement, but without understanding the reason behind it. Shiro was a leader who had identified a weakness in himself, and was making an honest effort to correct it. That he was somehow ashamed was a foolish notion; there was nothing Shiro had done here that was not admirable. Ulaz would honour his wish. Perhaps, when they knew each other a little better, he would ask for clarification.

“Thanks, though,” Shiro said. “For helping. I mean it.”

Shiro was looking at him, steady in face and voice and heart. The intensity of emotion behind the gratitude didn’t match the situation. “You are thanking me for...before,” Ulaz said slowly.

“Never had the chance, until now.” Shiro said. He smiled a little crookedly, took a deep breath, satisfied, and withdrew.

And all at once, Ulaz realized that he didn’t want to let go.

“Maybe it would help your current difficulty,” he said suddenly, riding the edge of some incredible daring, “if we fought.”

Shiro had already risen, was already halfway turned to leave. “Fought how?” he said.

“Sparred. Practiced together. Allow me to explain my reasoning.”

Shiro didn’t look back at him, but he didn’t leave, either. Ulaz took it as permission to proceed.

“I’m the only one here who knows what you’re capable of,” he said. It was the closest he’d come to talking about their shared history, but Shiro didn’t flinch from it. “You won’t need to hold back, with me.”

Shiro’s expression hadn’t changed; Ulaz began to wonder if he had misjudged. “I’m not exactly desperate to put myself back in an arena with a Galra,” he said, voice flat.

“Not an arena. Practice,” Ulaz said quickly. “Of course, you do not have to. It’s only an idea. I would encourage you to bring one of your paladins, if you’re unsure, but Shiro - I will not hurt you.”

“I could hurt you,” Shiro said. Not a threat - a worry.

“You could try,” Ulaz said. Not quite a challenge, not quite a taunt. Permission. Something in Shiro’s expression changed.

Something unnameable stretched in the silence between them, something that stole the air.

“Alright,” Shiro said at length. “Let’s see what happens.”

 

* * *

 

They walked to the training room together. It was small, but well-appointed; one thing the Blade had never taken lightly was martial ability. Shiro didn’t stop on the way to collect another paladin. Given how hard it had been for Shiro to even be in the same room as Ulaz just yesterday, Ulaz didn’t know if this was wise. It wasn’t his place to say; he had no choice but to trust Shiro’s judgement.

Shiro had agreed, after all. On some level, he must think it a good idea.

It had been emotion that pushed Ulaz into suggesting this course of action, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought his instincts had pushed him in the correct direction anyway. If he could remind Shiro of his victories, of how he had earned the name Champion, of why he had survived for so long when so many others did not, it might give him solid ground to stand on when his fear threatened.

They stripped off their extra layers, left their shoes behind, warmed up. Shiro’s routine was different than it had been as the Champion, and Ulaz was reminded, once again, that Shiro simply didn’t remember it.

What would that be like, he wondered as he and Shiro squared off. To know a trauma, but not the extent of it. To have your own history held secret.

Shiro threw a perfunctory punch, nowhere close to what he was capable of. Ulaz ducked and returned a strike that was fast enough to force Shiro to block, and the answering punch was harder, faster.

Shiro knew that Ulaz had been with him, at least a little, during his captivity. Ulaz had the pieces of Shiro’s missing memory, and Shiro hadn’t asked for them. It was evidence of fear, one that Ulaz could do nothing to dispel.

Nothing but this. Small things, when Shiro asked. Small progress, at Shiro’s discretion. Ulaz had watched him suffer for so long, powerless to do much to stop it, so if this is what Shiro needed, it was the least of what Ulaz would give.

“You’re distracted,” Shiro said, holding himself lightly on the balls of his feet. Ulaz recognized the weight shift just in time, and threw his arms up to stop a swift kick.

Shiro had settled. Behind his accusatory tone was confidence: this was squarely his territory. In his time as Champion, he’d defeated the worst monsters the galra could scrape together. He didn’t need his memory to know that: he was alive, after all. And his body remembered, even if he did not.

Ulaz swiped at him, and Shiro slid past the strike as though made of air itself. He was, suddenly, inside Ulaz’s guard, and Ulaz leapt to regain his distance.

He never noticed Shiro’s foot planted behind his leg until he was tripping over it. He hit the training mats hard, rolled out of the way. But Shiro wasn’t chasing him. He just waited for Ulaz to get back on his feet, rolling his shoulders. Not even breathing hard. Ready.

It was a challenge Ulaz was happy to answer. He’d promised Shiro that he needn’t hold back, after all. And he had an advantage Shiro did not: Ulaz, at Haggar’s side, had watched Shiro’s matches. He knew how Shiro fought.

So when they closed again, Ulaz matched him: speed for speed, skill against skill. For a moment, Shiro’s eyes widened in surprise, and then he sank down inside himself. He let the last of his caution lapse.

Finally, the expression on his face was one Ulaz recognized.

There was the ferocity Haggar had coveted. The brutality. Shiro was the finest predator the Galra empire had ever seen, and that day, he reminded Ulaz why.

And yet -

This Shiro - not the Champion, but the paladin - was stronger than he’d been before. More controlled. His metal hand didn’t light, but he used it with precision, fast enough to hit but not hard enough to hurt. Shiro wielded his body as an absolute weapon, unyielding and certain, a perfect concert of mind and muscle that only got more efficient as he relaxed into it - as he pressed himself towards its potential, as he stopped worrying that he would hit too hard.

Ulaz could take it. He had undergone the Trials, after all; there was not a member of the Blade that would fold under such punishment. And, for a cause like this, he would endure much more. Still, he only barely kept up, and then only by reaching for every trick he knew. Pressing Shiro on his left side, where it was harder for his Galra arm to engage; striking with every inch of his superior height and reach; anticipating Shiro’s feints, when he could.

And his effort was rewarded, after a few of these uneven exchanges, when a kind of joy appeared on Shiro’s face, in Shiro’s movements - the kind that comes with stretching a muscle long held cramped.

Ulaz pressed him. Ulaz tried. He never broke through Shiro’s defense, though he gave it his best effort, and Shiro grinned at him, at the end, when they were both breathing hard and exhausted.

That grin caught Ulaz unawares. For a bare moment, it arrested him.

And Shiro grabbed him and flipped him, easily and expertly, so that Ulaz had a stunned moment of seeing both his own feet and the ceiling, and then his breath pounded out of him as he hit the mat.

When his eyes refocused, he found Shiro’s hand out in front of his face. Waiting. Ulaz looked up at Shiro, at his flushed skin and his bright eyes, at his steadiness, at how easily he offered this contact.

Helplessly, Ulaz took it.

Shiro hauled him to his feet and they went for water. The warmth of Shiro’s hand remained afterwards, like a brand, in Ulaz’s palm.

 

* * *

 

Their time in the secret base was always going to be limited. They had only to stay long enough for Ulaz to receive instructions from the Blade’s commanders, and to make sure that Voltron wasn’t being tracked somehow. As Ulaz sat in the galley, late, he struggled to focus on Pidge’s medical history text.

Their instructions had come just after he and Shiro finished sparring: if there was no sign of pursuit twelve vargas from transmission, he was to bring Voltron to the main base to meet with the Blade of Marmora.

To form an alliance. To destroy the empire. To finally accomplish everything they’d spent centuries attempting.

And Ulaz struggled to focus because he wasn’t ready to leave here.

Finally, he gave up on reading. Let his eyes fall shut. Around him, the base hummed through its low-energy night cycle. Above him, the galley lights buzzed. The humans and the alteans slept for a long time, from Ulaz’s perspective; the galra tended to sleep more often, for shorter periods, but he had changed the base’s protocols to accommodate his guests. It was a comfort he was happy to provide.

He tipped his eyes back down to the text, but still couldn’t focus on it. His forearms carried sweetly stinging bruises from sparring, earlier; his thoughts kept turning, against his will, to Shiro standing above him, the ghost of a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth.

Such thinking was inappropriate. Still, Ulaz thought he could allow himself this indulgence. In mere vargas, he would return to active service within the Blade, and his superiors would take over management of the Voltron alliance. If he honoured Shiro, if he respected him more than anyone else he’d ever met, if he cared for him - well, it didn’t matter. They would be separated again, and soon.

An indulgence was all it would ever be. Ulaz was fine with that. Shiro lived because of him, and that was enough.

And then, startling him out of his thoughts, came a familiar sound as Shiro set his metal hand against the galley’s entryway.

Ulaz turned and, upon seeing Shiro, rose instinctively. He knew what the dark circles under his eyes meant, what the shaking in his hands meant. What it meant, that he was walking around in the night when he should be resting.

“You still have nightmares,” Ulaz said sorrowfully.

Shiro smiled. It was a thin and humourless thing. “Don’t let me disturb you. I just need some water.”

“Shiro,” Ulaz said, and Shiro waved his concern away.

It was a dismissal, and a warning. It stung.

Ulaz sank back into his seat as Shiro moved around the galley, pulling down a chipped mug, filling it from the filtering jug. Then he turned to lean against the counter and watched Ulaz watch him.

Caught, Ulaz didn’t bother looking away. Shiro drank, let the silence stretch. Rubbed at his eyes. “You said ‘still,’” he said at last.

 _You still have nightmares_. Ulaz could only nod.

“Great.” Shiro finished his water, set the mug down on the counter. Crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t want to know, do I?”

Ulaz didn’t know what part he was talking about. None of it - none of it had been good. He shook his head minutely.

Shiro sighed. Closed his eyes, testing the weight of his exhaustion. Finally, he pushed himself with weary effort off the counter. “I won’t be able to sleep again for a while,” he said. “Will you walk with me?”

“Of course,” said Ulaz at once, collecting his text, and he followed Shiro out into the darkened base.

Shiro didn’t seem to have a direction in mind; he hesitated at the first junction, then turned right with no urgency. Ulaz walked alongside him. This was not a new behaviour; obviously, Shiro had not been allowed to wander after his nightmares while a prisoner, but they had always made him restless.

This familiarity, as they walked, sat uneasily in Ulaz’s mind. It felt transgressive, as though he had been spying, gathering information about Shiro against his will and without his knowledge. It felt unfair.

“I have nightmares, too,” he offered as an attempt to assuage it, when Shiro’s silence grew tense between them.

“Sorry to hear that,” Shiro said, but flatly.

“I mention it so you know you’re not the only one who fears her,” Ulaz said.

Shiro didn’t answer him. He turned his eyes out the windows they walked past, then paused there. The strange warping of the pocket dimension caused the stars to refract and distort. Ulaz had always found the effect disquieting, but Shiro didn’t seem bothered.

“I didn’t remember what she looked like,” Shiro said to the stars. “It used to just be...I don’t know, hands, and blood, and arena stands filled with howling shadows. My dreams used to be full of teeth,” he said bitterly, “and now they’re just full of her.”

Ulaz rested his hands on the railing. He didn’t know what he could offer to chase that particular phantom away.

Shiro pressed his forehead to the glass. Outside, the vacuum waited. “You dream about her, too?”

It was as close as Shiro had ever come to asking. “Yes,” Ulaz said quietly. Shiro watched the stars, and Ulaz watched Shiro. “I was placed undercover with her some time before your arrival. Information on the weaponry she developed was key to the survival of the resistance.”

Shiro made a low sound as his eyes closed tight, and he rocked his head back and forth on the glass. “I knew. A part of me knew,” he said, dully accusatory. He wasn’t shocked; he spoke as though simply greeting the newest in a long line of disappointed hopes. Panic rose, hard and fast, in Ulaz’s throat. “You were in that room with me. You were _allowed_ to be. You helped her.”

“No.” It was vital that Shiro know this. To get his attention, Ulaz gently took Shiro’s elbow. Shiro jerked his arm away. A landslide of sorrow tumbled within Ulaz, made worse by the panic that had not subsided, panic that Shiro might think -

Shiro was standing, wary, facing him. Waiting, once again, to see if the moment for violence had come. _Gently_ , Ulaz reminded himself. _With caution._ He took hold of himself, melted his posture, bowed his head toward Shiro’s. Softened in every way he could.

“I worked for her, because I had to,” he began, pleading. “I ran errands for her. Ordered her supplies, managed her ship’s maintenance. And, when I could, I helped her captives. Snuck them extra food, blankets, whatever I could give them. It was not enough. I know that. But it was all I could do.”

Shiro hadn’t moved. His expression hadn’t changed. “You were in the room with me. Before you busted me out, the guards took orders from you.”

“They didn’t know who I was, only that I wore Haggar’s colours and knew what I was doing. I am very good at pretending, Shiro. It’s why I was given the assignment in the first place.”

“You could be lying.”

Ulaz nodded solemnly. There was no use denying that possibility. “I watched, from a hidden camera, when she gave you that,” he said, nodding at the scar on Shiro’s nose. He reached out - slowly - and this time, Shiro let his forearms settle in Ulaz’s palms. One of soft human skin. One of hard Galra metal. Ulaz felt the metal’s terrible weight in his hearts as much as his hand. “I watched when she did this. It was part of my job to watch, but I also would not let myself be blind to what happened. To what any of you suffered. She is in my nightmares as well as yours, Shiro. But so is that video feed, and me standing helpless on the other side of it.”

Shiro hadn’t pulled away. Ulaz bowed his head, let his thumb come to rest on the inside of Shiro’s elbow, on the thin skin there. “The information I passed on was important. It saved lives, saved the Blade. I couldn’t let her suspect - ”

“I know.”

“I cannot bear to have you think it was my choice, to serve her. Shiro, this is important to me.”

Shiro’s eyes were dark, dull with exhaustion. Sad. “You didn’t think you would get out of there alive either,” he said slowly.

Ulaz almost laughed. It was such a simple way to sum it up. The horrifying truth was that his plan had been very simple: he would spy on Haggar until he was found out, and then he would not allow himself to be captured. He hadn’t _thought_ he would die there. He had known it.

But then word had come, an unexpected relief: Ulaz was to free the Champion. To escape, if he could, and choose an abandoned base to hide out in until the Blade could safely collect him.

Nothing had gone according to plan, but Shiro had trusted him. Had followed his coordinates. Was here, now, with more than just the blue lion in tow.

Ulaz had been living with the threat of Haggar for a long time. He had been here, alone, trying to convince himself that he was safe, ever since. And now, after Ulaz had freed them both, the Champion was here.

And Ulaz still held his arms. He had moved beyond the indulgence he had decided to allow, had changed the meaning of it, and he hadn’t even noticed himself doing it.

Dangerous, that. Ulaz let his hands fall back to his side.

“I’m sorry,” Ulaz said, “that I could not do more to help you. To help any of them. It is the greatest regret of my life.”

Shiro nodded. When he turned back to the window, one hand drifted up to his elbow, holding the spot where Ulaz’s hand had been. It was a subconscious gesture, certainly, but Ulaz didn’t know what it meant. “You couldn’t have done anything to stop her, not on your own.”

Ulaz had said as much to himself many times. It did nothing for the guilt.

“You know, I’m glad I don’t remember the arm. The nose. The...everything else.” He smiled grimly; Ulaz only saw the reflection of it in the window. “It’s a small mercy, I guess. But if I remember right, I only have that mercy because someone caused an explosion as I was escaping. I hit my head when it threw me.”

Until that moment, Ulaz hadn’t known why Shiro’s memory had gone. It made an incredible kind of sense.

For the barest moment, Ulaz stood outside himself. Saw, with clarity, with a sense of infinite scale, the many branching paths of both their lives. Saw that they had overlapped exactly where it would save them both. It was an impossible strangeness, that he should be both the keeper of Shiro’s absent memories and the reason he was spared from them in the first place, even accidentally.

Impossible, but inevitable, too. Cosmically ordained. Right.

“What _do_ you remember?” he said, because he could think of nothing else.

Shiro blew out an exasperated breath. “Not much. Flashes. Impressions.” He pushed away from the window, resuming his walk. Ulaz followed, a small craft caught in Shiro’s inexorable orbit. He moved with more purpose, this time, and Ulaz thought the conversation had ended until Shiro scratched at the back of his head and his voice broke the quiet once again.

“Sometimes I get these - thoughts, I guess, and I don’t know where they came from or why they’re familiar. Like my brain has taken me down the same paths so many times it just got used to walking them, even once it forgot where they led.”

“What sort of paths?” Ulaz said, even though this was not a question he wanted to know the answer to.

Shiro startled him, then, by barking out a hard, sharp laugh. “Oh, stupid ones. I’ll see something happen and know that I could use it to annoy Haggar. When I fight, I think about what would happen if I struggled more, pushed Haggar’s buttons a little harder. I had those thoughts even before I remembered her name.”

It was a sorrow for both of them that Ulaz knew exactly what he was talking about. “I always wondered, back then, if it was a path you would take,” he said quietly.

Shiro stared ahead. “I wasn’t sure I could push her far enough to kill me.” He said it casually. Clinical. Detached.

“It would have taken very little. You saw her discard others with no reason at all,” Ulaz said, and Shiro flinched.

There it was again: Haggar’s voice in his head, her words, like a stain that would never come out. _Discard_. Speaking correctly around her had been paramount to Ulaz’s success. Learning how she spoke, how she thought, being able to emulate it - the performance was a repulsive one, but Ulaz had undertaken it because someone had to, and he could handle it. He had known it would be like this; the things one learns to survive tend to stick with them, even once the threat has passed. He had known, and he had accepted the cost. He didn’t get to complain about it now.

“For what it’s worth,” he said carefully into Shiro’s silence, “I’m very glad you didn’t try. Look where we are now - all because you endured. You gave us the time we needed to get you out.”

The corner of Shiro’s mouth twitched, rueful. Exhaustion was beginning to overtake him. It pushed all other emotion down, left Shiro blank-faced. When he spoke, it was with the bemused detachment of an observer. Ulaz had seen this before, too.

“There are some days I’m furious with myself,” said Shiro, the same way one might comment on a favourite colour. “There was once, at the start, when she was working on me - I don’t remember, exactly. But I remember going somewhere very far away, and choosing to go back. Fighting, hard, to go back. It’s something I kept thinking about - one of those paths I never stopped walking.”

Something ragged crept into his voice. As he kept talking, it almost overtook him. “It must have happened with every near miss in the arena, every injury. I must have been thinking - why did I choose to come back to this? I could have gone away, back then. I could go now. All I have to do is be a little slower, dodge a little later. Struggle just a little too hard with the right guard. So many ways out. And I never took any of them, and sometimes I’m so mad at myself that I can’t even breathe because of it.”

He trailed off. Both of them knew how that story ended. Shiro blew out a breath, paused at a junction, closed his eyes.

Ulaz’s memories were carving hard new paths in his hearts. He didn’t know what to do. “I am grateful that you are confiding in me. But why are you telling me this?”

“Because you were _there_ ,” he said, rough and low. “The others don’t know - I don’t _want_ them to know - how bad it got. But you already know, don’t you? You were _there_ ,” he said again.

“And now I am here,” Ulaz said gently. “We both are. We’re free, Shiro. We’re safe.”

Shiro tried to take a deep breath, and didn’t quite manage it. That raggedness was with him, still. It was winning. “Sometimes,” he said, “it just doesn’t feel that way.”

And that admission, abruptly, crossed some sort of boundary. Shiro’s eyes slid off Ulaz as though he wasn’t even there, and he pushed past him. Whatever unnameable thing had grown between them with their fingers pressed together, with the specter of a fight looming, with their shared horror strung between them, had vanished in the last few moments. Shiro had pulled himself back from it.

But he was still shaking.

Ulaz reached out, hesitated. Now was not the time to guess where Shiro’s boundaries lay. “Shiro,” he said, “I am unfamiliar with how your species expresses these things, but I wish to be a comfort. Please, tell me how I may be so.”

In the quiet light of the stars, Shiro stopped walking. When Ulaz came to stand beside him, he just stared up at Ulaz. There was that distance again, as though he was looking across a galaxy instead of the space between them.

“Just go,” he said quietly, at last.

“Shiro.”

“Please.”

“You’re in pain. Don’t make me leave you like this.”

Shiro had not moved. He was looking through Ulaz, staring down something that was confusing him, if the furrow between his eyebrows still meant what it used to.

Again, that imbalance. That secret knowledge. Ulaz wanted to sink to his knees, lay it all at Shiro’s feet. Couldn’t, and wouldn’t, unless Shiro asked.

Then Shiro bent his head. It was the first in a chain of sudden surrenders. He seemed to fold into himself all at once, with his hands clutching at his elbows, and then he stepped forward to press his forehead against Ulaz’s chest.

Ulaz’s breath caught, loud in the nighttime quiet.

He forgot, sometimes, how small Shiro was. The Shiro that existed in his mind was indomitable, unconquerable. He didn’t understand how someone so small could fight so hard, could survive so much. But Shiro tucked into him perfectly, sheltered from the storms of the universe as Ulaz hesitantly put his arms around Shiro’s shoulders.

Thace used to tease Ulaz about being fine-boned. He had never felt so sturdy as he did in this moment.

He could do this, he realized. He would be happy to do this - to stand between Shiro and what haunted them both, to safeguard his memories until he was strong enough to reclaim them. To stand with him against the empire that had strangled the universe for thousands of years. He had served the Blade since he was a child, and for the first time in his life, Ulaz realized that foundation had been shaken.

If they tried to send him away, he would turn from them forever. This - their fight, Voltron, _Shiro_ \- mattered more to him.

That was why he’d decided to allow himself this indulgence, he supposed: something like this could not be denied entirely. Some part of him must have known that. There was that sensation, like before, of hurtling towards landfall, and Ulaz welcomed it this time, too.

Shiro kept his arms crossed tightly between them, but kept his face pressed against Ulaz. One barrier broken, and another fiercely defended. A tiny progress. An enormous one. Under Ulaz’s hand, Shiro’s lungs shivered in a deep breath.

“This is crazy,” Shiro said, so softly Ulaz almost didn’t catch it.

“Is it...a comfort, also?”

Shiro nodded, the motion quite like rubbing his face against Ulaz. Perhaps for his species, the gesture was innocuous enough. For Ulaz’s, it was...not. He smiled to himself, a little guiltily, and looked out at the unsettling stir of the starlight in the gravity pocket’s distortion.

“It is a comfort to me, as well. You are a comfort to me,” Ulaz said.

The words surprised him. He hadn’t known they were true until that moment.

Shiro lifted his head. Weariness was overtaking him; it would win soon, would pull him away. The moment felt, suddenly, very fragile. “What do you mean?” Shiro asked.

In the softness of the starlight, Shiro’s dark eyes under that shock of white hair were too intense to look directly into. And yet, Ulaz couldn’t stop. The question had an answer, one he struggled to name.

It was something like their conversation, that first day on the base. Shiro had asked about family.

Something very like, and not.

Ulaz didn’t know what to say. The only answer that came to him was hesitant, a slow collapse of will. Ulaz couldn’t account for what either of his hearts were doing; in all his life, they had never felt this out of sync. Now they beat mercilessly out of time as he reached up and brushed his knuckles back over Shiro’s cheekbone.

Shiro’s expression changed.

“When you are safe, it reminds me that I am safe,” Ulaz said. “Shiro, I know your fear. I understand it. And I would help you bear it, if you would let me.”

There was a part of Shiro that remained far away, that still looked through Ulaz instead of at him. But now it was an active distance, as though - instead of being adrift - he was watching something approach. Something welcome. “Oh,” said Shiro into that distance, settling his human hand on top of Ulaz’s on his arm. “Is that all?”

“I know it is not an adequate answer,” Ulaz said. “It is the only explanation I have.”

Then, a gift: Shiro’s mouth quirked upwards at the corner. This was not the wide, toothy smile of Hunk, but it was a smile all the same. Soft. Small. True. Ulaz’s hearts forgot their rhythm, cast a distinct ba-ba-ba-dum-dum into his ears.

“That’s a pretty good answer, actually,” he said, and flicked his dark eyes up to meet Ulaz’s.

He was struck, instantly, with the full reality of Shiro’s presence - by his energy, his sudden focus, every unconquerable inch of him standing peacefully within Ulaz’s arms. Looking right at him, this time, with no flicker, no flinch, no fear at all.

 _Oh_ , Ulaz thought, a little dizzily. He felt as though the absolute axis of the station’s artificial gravity had been altered by half a degree.

“Listen,” Shiro started, dropping his gaze, “I don’t quite know what to do here. I’m so...I just can’t think properly right now.”

They had that in common, Ulaz thought. Shiro’s hand stayed clasped over his, a warm weight, gratefully borne. Shiro didn’t relax back into him. Ulaz wanted to pull him in. His hearts were full with that longing, muscles tense with it, but he held it carefully in check. Then he caught up to what Shiro had said - remembered the nightmare, the disrupted sleep cycle, the amount of rest Shiro had gotten so far compared to what he required.

“You should sleep,” Ulaz said softly. “I have kept you too long.”

“I should,” Shiro allowed. But he made no move to go.

Ulaz didn’t want him to. He felt that same wave of incredible daring that had pushed him to suggest a fight, earlier, and he was as helpless to deny this impulse as he was the last. “Would it be helpful,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “if I sat with you, to make sure nothing disturbed you?”

“I don’t know,” Shiro said, answering the question. Then, after a pause, and quietly: “Yes,” he said, answering the impulse.

And, well, Ulaz was not made of stone. There was a last collapse within him, a fondness he could hold back no longer, as he bent to touch his forehead to Shiro’s, as Shiro sighed into the simple contact, spine curving under Ulaz’s palm. Ulaz thought of Shiro, only yesterday, daring himself to let Ulaz touch his fingertips. Shiro, only yesterday, saying _Galra hands have never been gentle_.

How far they had come. Individually and together, walking their branching paths. Always, improbably, reconnecting.

They were almost out of time. The chronometer ticked away in the back of Ulaz’s mind. Only three vargas left in the human/Altean sleep cycles; only about six until they would all leave together for the Blade headquarters. He didn’t know what would happen, then. He didn’t know how to proceed.

But he would do it at Shiro’s side. They would be alright, the two of them.

All they had to do was survive.

 

 


End file.
